Thursday, October 9, 2008

Reviews in the Local Papers

Back on Labor Day weekend, Dry Rain played at the One Reel Festival at Bumbershoot. We owe a big thank you to Beth Barrett at SIFF for taking Dry Rain in as one of the films on the schedule. I was out of town that weekend so wasn't able to attend. Luckily, we did get some nice reviews from a couple of the local papers.

The Seattle Weekly was very kind. They draw comparisons to Dry Rain and the work of Terrance Malick. We certainly looked at Malick's work and adopted a similar asthetic. It is interesting that someone saw that influence. Here's what they said: "Matthew Clark’s sparse, effective Dry Rain suggests Terrence Malick with a sense of humor, as a messy custody battle finds perennial hard-luck case James Le Gros and his (rather smarter) son dithering at the Canadian border. It could be a scene from a longer feature."

The Seattle Times had this to say: "Filmed in Montana, it features character actor James LeGros as a melancholy father who reluctantly returns his son to his mother's legal custody. It's one of the most professional films in the festival, but it begs for feature-length expansion."

One thing that comes from the newspaper comments is they both elude to Dry Rain being a longer film possibly being a feature. I have to admit, I never gave much thought to that option. I always felt that Pete Fromm captured a nice snapshot of the moment with plenty to think about that is never scene or told in the story directly, but, the story in Dry Rain is compelling and it could be an interesting exploration in longer form seeing how the two come to be in their current predicament. I'll have to think about that one!